Carafem: Just Another Day at the Abortion-Spa

Big props to the new abortion clinic Carafem in Washington, DC.

It's got ALL the fetus freaks' knickers knotted.

With its natural wood floors and plush upholstery, Carafem aims to feel more like a spa than a medical clinic. But the slick ads set to go up in Metro stations across the Washington region leave nothing to doubt: “Abortion. Yeah, we do that.”

The Maryland clinic, opening this week in Montgomery County’s tony Friendship Heights area, specializes in the abortion pill. The advertising reflects its unabashed approach — and a new push to de-stigmatize the nation’s most controversial medical procedure by talking about it openly and unapologetically.

Website.

It's hard to say what has the freaks most outraged -- that women could be treated decently, that abortion could be treated like any other medical procedure, or that a business, yes, a business, could aim to help destigmatize a common life event.

The Dominionist Astroturf Gang, We Need a Law (Like a Hole in the Head), is appalled that the furniture is comfy.

SUZY ALL-CAPS is SHRIEEKING that abortion will be destigmatized OVER HER DEAD BODY!!!!!!!!

http://www.bigbluewave.ca/2015/03/abortion-will-never-be-de-stigmatized.html

Kay Mère, as befits her very limited cognitive processing ability, is all over the map in her objections.

She cites a "left-leaning think tank" that points out that destigmatization worked for the LBGT community by sharing stories and coming out to friends and families.

But this is an untenable comparison. Gays are human beings with a minority sexual orientation.

As opposed to people who have abortions who are not human beings but amoral, irresponsible baby-killing sluts.

Ultimately, what bugs her the most is that Carafem is a business and this new and humane approach to a common procedure may make them money!!!!

The Focus on the Family Astroturf Gang, as usual, takes its cue from Kay, considered to be among the more "reasonable" of anti-choicers, and squeals about the profit.

Well, shut my mouth. I thought all these right-wing nut-jobs worshipped at the altar of the Free Market.

These are the same people eager to label any efforts by government to regulate contraception and abortion services as Communist! Fascist! Maoist! (You get the idea.)

Yet, these are also the people who revelled in the gore and filth of Kermit Gosnell's totally unregulated predatory racket.

But who insisted that there must be Gosnells in Canada. We just haven't caught them yet.

This Carafem development has them shoved back in that terrible pickle again.

HORRORS! People needing abortions are being treated decently.

HORRORS! People needing abortions (in the US) must pay for them and so will prompt entrepreneurs to cater to them.

HORRORS! If people needing abortions are treated decently, there will be no more Gosnells, no more stigma, no more needless suffering.

Ha. I say again -- props to Carafem.

By the way, the cost of a medical abortion at Carafem is below average.

The average pharmaceutical abortion cost about $500 in the United States in 2011, Guttmacher figures show; [Carafem President Christopher] Purdy plans to charge around $400.

FFS: Near Defamation (Is That a Thing?)

This is the blogosphere. I geddit. I can dish it out and and I can take it.

But there are some things that cannot be allowed to stand. Two comments on the Focus on the Family Astroturf Blog (FFAB) fall into this category.

Background first.

Yesterday, I blogged about the Christian Medical and Dental (?) Society's quest to be exempted from new rules requiring physicians (eat your inferiority-complected hearts out, DDSs) to refer patients for treatments that CMDS members find objectionable.

I had what I thought was a simple solution, first voiced on Twitter…

@fernhilldammit I'm sorry but I'm not at liberty to divulge the names of our members.
— CMDS Canada (@CMDSCanada) March 26, 2015

… then again in the blogpost.

Tell us who you are so we can run a mile from you.

As reported yesterday, FFAB called me a hypocrite for asking for names and promising to publish them when I use a pseudonym.

The illogic of that didn't bother me. Neither did the snide remarks about my personality, writing skills, and psychology, both in the blogpost and gleefully added by commenters. (Comments haven't yet descended into speculations about my body hair and weight; they are admirably restraining themselves.)

One commenter though, John Baglow, wondered what the problem was when the intent is clearly to inform potential patients of probable mis-matches between their needs and the medicos' moral capacities.

Two commenters took it upon themselves to respond.

Here's what can't stand -- implications that I intended some kind of harm to come to anti-choice MDs.

Melissa said:

I don’t suppose that naming doctors would be such a bad thing if there weren’t a group of pro-choicers who were dead set on taking them down. But when you have a small group of people (ie the Radical Handmaids) who are committed to taking these doctors down, to bullying these doctors in a media that is quite receptive to the pro-choice cause and quite hostile to the pro-life one. Nobody wants to get caught in one of those smear campaigns, which understandably makes them reluctant to make their names known publicly.

Mary Deutscher said:

If only Fern Hill were naming physicians to help patients avoid them! The fear here is that physicians are being named to be targeted and reprimanded for refusing to harm their patients.

"Dead set on taking them down." "Bullying." "Hostile." "Smear campaigns [!!]". "Fear." "Targeted."

FFS.

I know, I know, I know. It's just typical fetus fetishist self-pity and martyr-card deployment.

IANAL, but I'm pretty sure those comments wouldn't qualify as defamation either.

But they are on the path to defamation and I call on FFAB's Andrea Mrozek to disavow herself and her blog from them.

Deletion of them and an apology would be nice but I'm not holding my breath.

I intend to leave a link to this post in a comment at the blog.

UPDATE: As of noon, Saturday, March 28, Andrea Mrozek has not responded. My comment with a link to this post was published though.

UPPITY-DATIER: I woke on Sunday to the comment from Joel Kropf (below) urging me to meet Mrozek and this from her at the Astroturf blog:
"Fern, I’m happy to address anything with you, in person. Invitation for coffee still stands.
PS Since so much is misinterpreted over text/twitter/email, I’ll add this is not a sarcastic comment."

Is it just me or is this getting creepy?

No. I have no interest in meeting Mrozek in person. I want her to address the implication that I intended harm ONLINE. The implication was made ONLINE and needs to be addressed -- if at all -- ONLINE.

Mrozek, you created the opportunity for stupidity to occur. It is your obligation to fix it.

Or not.

My physical presence is not required.

ProWomanProForcedPregnancy Is a Total Stand-Alone (Astroturf) Organization

In a recent blogpost about March for Lies being such a good teachable moment for young women to learn slut-shaming and sanctimonious judgement, we mentioned that the original article by Amanda Watson seems to have struck a nerve with those professional female slut-shamers over at ProWomanProForcedPregnancy.

They responded with their lie protest that they are NOT affiliated with other organizations.

You be the judge. The principal is Andrea Mrozek. Here's her day job.

Andrea currently works at the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada as Manager of Research and Communications.

But PWPFP is not owned or affiliated with James Dobson's loathesome Focus on the Family, they say.

Seems opinions differ on that.

Focus on the Family Canada (French: Objectif Famille) is a Canadian affiliate of the American evangelical Christian organization Focus on the Family.
. . .

Focus on the Family Canada is operated and directed independently of Focus on the Family USA.[citation needed] However, some ties do exist between the two organizations. Between 2000 and 2003, the Canadian affiliate received $1.6 million in services from the larger American organization. Two members on the board of directors of Focus on the Family Canada, Tom Mason and Jim Daly, are also vice-presidents of Focus on the Family in the United States. Other than receiving financial support from Focus on the Family USA between 2000 and 2003, Focus on the Family Canada relies fully on donor support for its operations.
. . .
Focus on the Family Canada has also established the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada/Institut du Mariage et de la Famille Canada (IMFC).

It's all just a big coincidence that Mrozek moonlights as the principal of an astroturf anti-abortion website.

Make sense to you?

ADDED: In addition to Mrozek, at least four other of The Women make their livings at least in part from anti-choice activities/careers.

Faye Sonier

Faye joined The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada as Legal Counsel. She practices constitutional and human rights law, with a special focus on freedom of religion and sanctity of human life issues.

Deborah Mullan

In March she finally secured a very part-time job as the office manager for the Victoria Right to Life Society.

Natalie Hudson Sonnen

Natalie is now the executive director of LifeCanada, a national pro-life organization based out of Ottawa.

Véronique Bergeron

Currently employed as an assistant to a federal Member of Parliament, Véronique Bergeron is also teaches biomedical ethics to Masters students at St-Paul University in Ottawa.

That MP would be anti-choice Pierre Lemieux and St-Paul University is the pontifical arm of the University of Ottawa.

While bloggers at DAMMIT JANET! are not 'anonymous' as charged, but rather pseudonymous with long-established online personae, not a single one of us makes a nickel from our pro-choice writing and activism.

Fun with Fetus Fetishists

Me, I'm bored with SUZY CAPSLOCK. http://www.bigbluewave.ca/ And not just because of HER juvenile habit of redirecting any links to HER blog to fetal pr0n sites (hence, plain text url). Sure, SHE is occasionally hilarious, but mostly just boring, not to mention ponderously Catlick.

Now we haven't exactly ignored the 'new wave' of anti-choice/anti-feminist sites like Signal Hill, aka ProLife BC, and ProWoman ProLife, but I intend to pay more attention to them, starting a little while ago with PWPL's endorsement of the abusive, violent, father's rights guy Greg Fultz, aka The Billboard Guy.

These new wave efforts (mostly) eschew the old blame the sluts women, they-should-keep-their-legs-together, religious/legal approach. Instead, they adopt a treacly concern for women, maintaining that abortion 'harms' women.

PWPL is more interesting than Signal Hill/ProLife BC because it tries a lot harder to pretend that it is a real blog and not an astroturfed initiative by a fundy religious group.

It claims that its goal is not legal recriminalization of abortion but moral and logical suasion. Its motto is 'Canada without abortion. By choice.' (Note co-option of our language; there's a lot of that.)

From the site's The Story page:

…Pro-woman because we are pro-life…

The idea that abortion is a woman’s right was always just an opinion. There’s no basis in law, in logic or in our constitution. And there’s certainly no basis in early feminist thought.

The early feminist thought bit is true. Early feminists were, sensibly, more concerned with voting and property rights than reproductive rights. First things first, after all. Margaret Sanger was herself anti-abortion, a fact antichoicers omit when they are excoriating her for her (quite progressive at the time) views on eugenics.

More from The Story:

The idea for ProWomanProLife was developed by founding director Andrea Mrozek. “It’s not a woman’s right to have an abortion,” says Mrozek. “There’s no such thing as a right to an abortion, not for women, not for men. It doesn’t contribute to women’s rights and freedoms at all, because having an abortion is, put simply, not a right.”

That's a bit twisty, innit? Doesn't contribute to rights and freedoms because it's not a right? Well, if one considers bodily integrity and autonomy a right -- as sane people do -- then it bloody well is a right.

More:

* ProWomanProLife is a home for all women who believe that being pro-life is compatible with women’s rights and freedoms.

Trans: PWPL is for women with the ability to hold diametrically opposed opinions at the same time.

* ProWomanProLife celebrates women’s legitimate choices, freedoms and rights.

Trans: 'Legitimate' as our lords and masters decide.

* ProWomanProLife believes abortion is bad for women and that women will be integral in removing abortion from our cultural landscape.

Trans: For 'bad', see 'legitimate' above.
DJ!: Fine, remove it from 'cultural landscape', whatever that may be, as long as it is left in the medical landscape.

* ProWomanProLife desires to bring an end to abortion, not by coercion, but by choice.

Trans: See? We worked the magic word 'choice' in again.

* ProWomanProLife believes abortion is a human, social issue, not a religious or faith matter, whereby women and men of any faith or no faith at all can stand up in support of women’s rights and life, at the same time.

DJ!: That's just a great big porky pie. See below.

* ProWomanProLife understands the fetus is a new and unique human being from conception, separate from, though dependent on, the woman.
* ProWomanProLife believes that the fetus is deserving of protection.

Trans: We reserve the right to display gory fetal pr0n anytime we get backed into a corner.

Here's the porky: From The Women section:

Andrea [Mrozek] currently works at the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada as Manager of Research and Communications.

That Institute is the wholly owned subsidiary of the evangelical, Xian Focus on the Family.

Focus on the Family Canada is "committed to helping families thrive." Its mission is to "encourage and strengthen the Canadian family through education and resources based on Christian principles"; its purpose is to "love God and our neighbours by serving Canadian families and encouraging them to pursue a growing relationship with Jesus Christ"; and its guiding principles include the preeminence of evangelism, permanence of marriage, the value of children, the sanctity of human life, the relationship of church, family and government.

The other Women are painted as young, dynamic career women, who just care so darn much about (benighted) other women that they devote their spare time to propagandizing against promoting women's rights. Short of the right to bodily integrity and autonomy, natch.

Since they're all about respectful dialogue, yadayada, they are not so quick with the 'delete comment' button. I've posted comments, usually with pertinent links and usually ignored, over there. Viz, their Billboard Guy post. And Mrozek's belated and evasive response.

More recently, I chimed in on their latest attempt to appear relevant, in this case on the Saudi women's campaign to drive.

Commenting on true infringements of women’s rights is something PWPL likes to do.

'True' infringements like a ban on driving. In a Muslim country, note. Many more 'true infringements', in their view, seem to occur in Muslim places than Western places, but no matter about that.

Another new post over there (sorta) takes on the gender imbalance caused by sex-selective abortion in some parts of the world. Just to show you how serious they are, they quote Kathy Shaidle who SHRIEEEKS about how such an imbalance is imminent in Toronto because of all the -- you guessed it -- Muslim immigrants.

Anti-feminists/fetus fetishists love sex-selective abortion. They consider it the ultimate Gotcha! If feminists defend it, Gotcha! The evul feminazis are condoning killing 'unborn women' (no shit, that's how they refer to female embryos). If feminists don't condone it, Gotcha! Evul feminazis believe there should be some restrictions on abortion. If feminists don't address it, Gotcha! Haul out the 'where are the feminists?' refrain. (There is a new book about this generating some comment. I'm working on a response.)

So. An invitation from DJ! to like-minded readers: pop over there occasionally. Leave a (respectful) comment, with irritating links to facty-sciency stuff.

Let's show them some love.

Maybe a coupla iterations of the 'you know, you DON'T speak for me' refrain that anti-feminists love to throw at feminists wouldn't be outta line either.

(It's gonna be a loooong four years of The Harper Regime. I'm trying to find some fun where I can.)

Gawd Says: as interpreted by Focus on the Family

Shorter Candi Cushman of US Focus on the Family: Homophobes? Nonsense, we're here to preach God's love for heterosexuals and only heterosexuals.

Only rightwing intolerant christian zealots *really* know what God says and so The Focus on the (fundamentalist religious nuclear) Family will shrieeek as loudly as it can over the "Day of Silence".

Other families - here, and there - are offensive to the christianists and their Gawd and are thus rejected as 'unnatural'.

Noted catholic bigot Margaret Somerville used academic flourishes to disguise the hideous loathing, and perhaps envy, that seethes from her form of family worship. So shallow is the defense of her opinion that her final resort is a quote from a woman (who owes her existence to reproductive technology) equating these medical interventions with the crime of sexual assault.

Responses to Somerville's peroration can be found here.

US States that allow same-sex marriages have lower divorce rates.

Statistical data analysis should not be attempted by amateurs. Maurice Vellacott, for example. The Fetus©™ fetishists insist on claiming that there is a cause & effect relationship between abortion and mental health for women who have terminated pregnancies, as well as between abortion & breast cancer.

Now we hear that 'Murrican states who have banned same-sex legal marriages seemingly have higher divorce rates, here. * Apparently those couples haven't heard the claims shrieeeked over and over again by conservative religious organizations such as Focus on the Family and R.E.A.L. (anti-feminist) women to the effect that heterosexual marriages are under attack!

Here's an excerpt from this pollster/poll compilator:

The differences are highly statistically significant. Nevertheless, they do not necessarily imply causation. The decision to ban same-sex marriage does not occur randomly throughout the states, but instead is strongly correlated with other factors, such as religiosity and political ideology, which we have made no attempt to account for. Nor do we know in which way the causal arrow might point. It could be that voters who have more marital problems of their own are more inclined to deny the right of marriage to same-sex couples. [...]

At the very least, I would be surprised if there were any statistical evidence that interpreting the right of marriage to apply to same-sex couples would be injurious to heterosexual couples in any material way.

*Don't forget to read the batshitcrazy comments by the usual US rightwingnuts, teabaggers, homophobes and religiously disordered zealots.

Deconstruct This!

Over at Canadian Cynic, psa blogged a response - Adventures In Thinkering! (Redux) - to comments about an earlier blogpost.

In the combox, CWTF asked someone, anyone to dissect the above pic.

DJ! is always, ready and willing to rise to any challenge that might provide an opportunity to smack down Stevie Spiteful. A larger format is available here for those who wish to scrutinize the details, here. The original, here.

1) The stride. Mom and kids are walking naturally. Stevie has a stiff-leg gait, like a low-rent goose-step.

Boo-hoo-hoo!

In all the batshit craziness steaming out of the Excited States, a bit of good news.

Focus on the Family announced Wednesday it is laying off 8 percent of its work force, casualties of the latest budget shortfall at the influential conservative Christian group.

Seventy-five employees will lose their jobs and an additional 57 vacant positions will remain unfilled, said Gary Schneeberger, spokesman for the evangelical ministry founded by child psychologist James Dobson.

The cutbacks are necessary because projections show the group will fall 5 percent short of a $138 million budget for the fiscal year ending this month, Schneeberger said.

Last fall FOF reduced staff by 200.

Maybe the loonitude is turning off the less loony. We can only hope. . .

The Family That Preys Together.

Via Crooks and Liars, we learn the evangelical religious writing of John Eldredge - who broke away from Focus on the Family - is providing La Familia Michoacana, a notorious Mexican drug cartel, with a blueprint for the ideal organizational structure.

By using a patriarchal family model as the template for building the perfect hierarchy

... La Familia has developed into a faith-based right-wing populist social movement emanating from and orchestrated by an organization that happens to be a well-armed, well-financed violent criminal enterprise.

... an internal intelligence report on La Familia from the Mexican justice department surfaced, bringing the news that the faith-based cartel grounds its indoctrination program on the writings of macho Christian author and veteran Focus On The Family senior fellow John Eldredge, who now heads Ransomed Hearts Ministries in Colorado Springs.

Eldredge made his name as one of the prime leaders for Dobson's anti-gay crusade when he worked for FOTF. There is more about his influence in this July Dogs blogpost which also includes a grisly photograph of severed heads from an execution carried out by La Famila members. It would seem that some macho adherents of Eldredge's "muscular" and "tribal" religious doctrine are following it literally.

Ooops, she's done it again.

Surely not on purpose, to create a media brouhaha around the release of her new CD and the start of her tour to promote the CD. But Britney Spears is making headlines. Again.

The Parents Television Council is warning parents about the Britney Spears song "If U Seek Amy" and urging radio stations not to broadcast it because the nonprofit organization believes it "would violate the broadcast indecency law" if aired between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. Saying the title phrase quickly out loud produces a sound akin to spelling out the F-word, said PTC president Tim Winter. "There is no misinterpreting the lyrics to this song, and it's certainly not about a girl named Amy," he said of the track, the third single from Spears' new Jive album, "Circus."

And what is the PTC? It is directed by Brent Bozell:

Founder and President of the Media Research Center, Mr. Bozell runs the largest media watchdog organization in America. Established in 1987, the MRC has made "media bias" a household term, tracking it daily and printing the compiled evidence biweekly in its well-known Notable Quotables, which also releases an annual "Best of NQ" edition selected by a nationwide panel of judges active in the news industry. His most recent book, Weapons of Mass Distortion: The Coming Meltdown of the Liberal Media, was released in July of 2004. Other MRC books include And That's the Way It Is(n't): A Reference Guide to Media Bias; Pattern of Deception: The Media's Role in the Clinton Presidency; How to Identify, Expose and Correct Liberal Media Bias; and Out of Focus: Network Television and the American Economy.

Right. That's it in a nutshell. By the way, if you check the list of articles recommended, written by members of its advisory board, you'll note that most focus on the evuls of S-E-X. Violence? Not so much. Oh, it seems really cozy with another group that spends a lot of time shrieeekkking about stuff that offend religious fundamentalist rightwingnutz sensibilities - the homophobic, misogynist, no-choice and reactionary organization Focus on the Family.

Some progressives expressed discomfort with the number of times that the "G" word appeared in US president Obama's inaugural speech. Perhaps a strategic use of that word, in order to demonstrate that religious fundamentalist rightwingnutz don't own the monopoly on faith is a savvy thing to do.

As for the song .... sure hope it doesn't affect the future sales of Jamie Lynn Spears' book about parenting, Christian-style-like.